The world reportedly uses 40,000 gallons of oil every second to keep the globe a-whirring. But what would this river of Texas Tea look like? The amount of water per second that flows down India's Jog Falls.

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Harry at Harryhammer's Blog decided to put global oil consumption in visual terms. Harry first calculated the amount of oil the world uses per second:

According to David O'Reilly the CEO of CHEVRON, the world currently consumes oil at a rate of about 40,000 US gallons per second. He says, "the scale of the energy system is enormous."

So, I did some math.

1 barrel of oil = 42 US gallons

1 cubic meter = 264.172052 US gallons

According to the 2008 World Fact-book, the world currently consumes about 85,270,000 barrels of oil per day.

85,270,000 barrels per day x 42 US gallons per barrel = 3,581,340,000 US gallons per day = 149,222,500 US gallons per hour = 2,487,042 US gallons per minute = 41,451 US gallons per second.

Next, Harry compared world oil consumption per second to the flow rate of waterfalls. Jog Falls in India - with its 153 cubic meters per second - nearly synced up with this amount.

What's even more unfortunate is that the flow rate* of Jog Falls is still slightly less than world oil consumption. Harry also encourages readers to "imagine [the waterfall] on fire with black smoke billowing into the air" to truly appreciate the horror of this statistic. Depressing.

*Of course, Harry worked backwards from average annual statistics, and the water output for Jog Falls likely differs during monsoon season, but hey, it's a striking visual.